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Tag Archives: Arteries

From Your Health Journal…..A very good article from The Australian via The Times written by Chris Smyth entitled Overweight Mothers ‘Give Birth To Babies With Clogged Arteries’ – a well written and informative article I wanted to promote. We have discussed here recently about the obesity epidemic facing adults and children all over the world. We have posted articles from at least a dozen countries pointing to problems in their homeland about obesity. Obesity related illness is also on the rise – as many people are showing risk factors for cancer, heart disease, weak joints, type 2 diabetes, asthma, as well as low self-esteem. Sedentary lifestyles, increased usage of technology, poor diets, and lack of physical activity are all to blame. Now, new research suggests that the babies of overweight mothers are born with the first signs of heart disease. Scientist have discovered that the walls of the body’s main artery are already thickened in newborns whose mothers are obese or overweight, and the fatter the women the more their babies’ arteries appeared to be clogged. These are very important findings, and I suggest you read the full story (link provided below) to learn more.”

From the article…..

The babies of overweight mothers are born with the first signs of heart disease, Australian research suggests.

The walls of the body’s main artery are already thickened in newborns whose mothers are obese or overweight, and the fatter the women the more their babies’ arteries appeared to be clogged, scientists have found.

Experts cautioned that the study was too small to be certain, but suggested that overweight mothers were increasing their children’s risk of heart disease in later life.

Most women giving birth are now overweight or obese, and campaigners said the latest findings added urgency to efforts to reduce the weight of new mothers.

Australian scientists looked at 23 women whose body mass index ranged from normal to morbidly obese early in pregnancy, and when their babies were seven days old scanned the newborns’ abdominal aortas, the section of the artery running down to the belly.

The thickness of the innermost walls of the artery ranged from 0.65mm to 0.97mm and increased with the mother’s weight, irrespective of the size of the baby itself. There was a difference of 0.06mm between babies of overweight and normal weight mothers.

Michael Skilton and his team from the University of Sydney said that this hinted that arteries were already clogged up at birth.

“The earliest physical signs of atherosclerosis [clogging of the arteries] are present in the abdominal aorta, and aortic intima-media thickness is considered the best non-invasive measure of structural health of the vasculature in children; suggesting a putative mechanism by which maternal adiposity [fatness] may influence the risk of later cardiovascular disease in the offspring,” Dr Skilton and his team write in the journal Fetal and Neonatal Edition of Archives of Disease of Childhood.

Tam Fry of the National Obesity Forum said that the findings were worrying.

“Babies are starting to have a pretty rough existence before they’re born because of the weight of their mothers,” he said.

“The lesson we should get from this is we’ve got to be really much more focused on making sure women of child-bearing age from the earliest point, back in school, get the message that if they think of having babies they have to think of the responsibility to get themselves healthy before conceiving. There has got to be a lot of pressure on women to go into pregnancy at the right weight. There’s still this myth about eating for two, that you have to eat more.